Online Shopping Sends Textbook Prices Falling
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This is Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Your Money Matters. I'm Charlie Turner in New York. It may be relatively small comfort to those wrestling with the ever-rising costs of college, but for college students and their parents, it's still good news. Textbook prices are falling, and the reason is the same reason for just about any other product, a surge in online comparison shopping. Joining us is Wall Street Journal Washington reporter Sarah Cheney. Sarah, prices for textbooks have gotten prohibitively expensive, but now students can find the exact same textbook online for a much lower price, can't they?
Yes, yeah, they actually can. And it's a pretty interesting trend because for so many years, textbook prices were rising at a really rapid clip. But in recent months, we've actually seen the reverse occur. So prices for educational books and supplies, which is how
How have textbook prices changed recently and why does it matter?
the Labor Department classifies textbooks have fallen on an annual basis for three consecutive months. This actually started with a 1.6% annual decline in September, which was the fastest rate of decrease for the category of goods going back to 1967, which was when the Labor Department started tracking this data. And in October and November, prices also fell. And it's important to note that we're primarily talking about college textbooks here. College textbooks account for about 90% of the goods in the educational books and supplies group. It also includes books for elementary and high school classes, as well as encyclopedias.
It seems to me this is resulting in two things. Students can obviously find the same textbook online at a much lower price, and it's also forced publishers to lower their prices on these textbooks.
Yes, that's pretty much accurate. So the old model in which hardcover textbooks are sold in college bookstores is really being offended as a number of different competitive pressures, mainly in the online realm, as well as students' demand for more affordable books propel traditional publishers to offer a lot of different cheaper options for students. So these lower-priced digital options are coming through in the consumer price data for textbooks, and in some cases, like you said, we're actually seeing publishers lower prices for print textbooks. So, for example... Macmillan Learning, which is a textbook provider and online learning company, said it has reduced its average print textbook prices by somewhere between 20 and 25 percent in the 18 months ended in October.
And this was in part due to students demanding more affordable books and materials.
I'm speaking with The Wall Street Journal's Sarah Cheney, and you're listening to Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening, everyone. Sarah, I think one student that you quoted in the story said, well, I'm never going to a bookstore again because I think she could obviously find pretty much anything she wanted online for a lot cheaper price. What are some of the sites that students are scouring?
Sure. There's obviously Amazon, and that's a huge force. That's a site that a lot of students are going to first before they even check the campus bookstore prices, etc., You also have eBay and textbooks.com. And then you also have Barnes & Noble, for instance, offering rentals of textbooks. And so those are just some of the options we're seeing. And then what's really interesting, I think, is there's a site called OpenStax, which offers free downloadable copies of a lot of different introductory textbooks. So it's essentially at no cost for students.
And you write that publishers are also responding in other ways, offering alternative formats, including e-books and interactive digital books with diagnostic quizzes.
What evidence shows college textbook prices are falling?
These are also other cheaper options. And e-books are accounting for a growing share of the consumer price index data for educational books. So that's likely influencing the overall price data there. And publishers are offering loose-leaf binders, which are cheaper, and these interactive digital books and courses that publishers are selling in volume to professors so professors can negotiate the prices to be lower per student.
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